Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.

Axing this Commission is a right Royal shame

It wasn't supposed to be a wake, but – if I'm honest – that's pretty much what it turned out to be. A group of the fairly great and reasonably good turned out last night for a "valedictory seminar" of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which is due to fall under the Government's axe on, of all days, April 1.

As a standing Royal Commission, it was a rare beast and, as one that had lasted for four decades, it was even stranger. Such idiosyncrasy is not popular in Whitehall – and still less so is the independence of mind and structure it habitually exhibited (it reported not to ministers but to the Queen) – so it has been close to getting the chop several times before. But each time it was saved before it got to the scaffold because it was just too valuable and, indeed, too useful to kill.

It always had eminent members – leaders of green pressure groups and the like never got their importunate feet in the door. They came from a wide variety of disciplines, but because the commissioners turned over relatively slowly an atmosphere of mutual trust built up; there were rows and disagreements enough, but the essential unity remained. And it produced weighty, authoritative and generally well-considered reports, which ministers had to take seriously.

Unusually – and unlike other Royal Commissions – it generally picked its own subjects to study (only three of its reports, over its long life, were commissioned by ministers). Sometimes it produced a definitive report on an already much-debated issue, at others it put a little-discussed topic onto the national agenda. Several were big game-changers. One on nuclear power, in 1976, accurately defined the things to worry about (eg waste disposal and nuclear proliferation and terrorism) and those that should not arouse much concern (eg low-level radiation) – defining the debate ever since. One on transport in 1994 effectively ended a road building programme hailed as "the greatest since the Romans". And a third gave ministers – who wanted to phase out lead in petrol but were scared to do so – an excuse and rationale for action.

Ministers and officials say the Royal Society and other scientific bodies can do the job, but they can't. Scientists usually have too narrow a focus and too conventionally consensual an approach: it was the mixture of lay and scientific members that made the Royal Commission work.

Sooner or later it will have to be reinvented, and maybe the process is already beginning. There are plans for a similar scrutinising body, funded by private foundations, not government. And there is talk of a Europe-wide committee. Both were being touted at yesterday's seminar, suggesting that there may yet be a wakening beyond the wake.